N/N #14: Emily Antico
"I love being from Brooklyn but all the things that I love about it are slowly slipping away"
*Emily and I meet at Zatar Cafe & Bistro in Park Slope, both in need of iced tea because it is sweltering*
How did we meet?
E: WAIT. I NEED TO SEND A TEXT.
K: Take your time
E: Wait, are you recording? No, I’ll send it later, the text will just say “Catan tonight?”
*Self-reminder that I need someone to teach me how to play*
E: We met in the glorious halls of Edward R. Murrow High School. Which I visited just last week
K: Oh yeah, 'cause your mom works there!
E: Yeah.. it was nostalgic and terrifying
K: What does she do there?
E: She’s a school secretary
*We discuss how much things have changed/stayed the same*
E: Chock (Chock full o' nuts) is gone
K: NO IT IS NOT!! I biked through the area recently and they just moved it down the street but you know I had to stop in for that crack iced coffee
E: They were opening up this new Palestinian restaurant on 3rd Avenue and I peeked through the window because it looked bomb as fuck, I knocked on the glass, and lo and behold, Abdul opened the door, he looked me in the eye and said french vanilla with almond milk?
K: He owns so many restaurants now! Ayat on Cortelyou! Back in the day, him working at Chock was a blessing. I went there after school as we all did, my phone was on a table, someone elbow knocks it over and I had no case, no screen protector, raw-dogging life. He noticed what happened, came up to me, and said “Let me have it overnight and we can meet at the end of your school day tomorrow, the screen will be brand new” I said okay my king. I came by the next day, the screen fixed and he refused to let me pay him my weekly allowance of $25
E: I think about living like that sometimes. Wow-my allowance got me a pack of Newports and a four-loko
What does being a New Yorker mean to you?
E: Oh man. I can’t wait to get my New Yorker tattoo. I pride myself so much on being a New Yorker even though I hate what New York has become. I can see past it and be so grateful that I was raised in what was left of old-school Brooklyn. I could play outside with my friends until the sun went down and walk around aimlessly. Sadly, that opportunity may already be gone or will soon be lost in the same way. It’s because of technology, gentrification, or whatever you want to put it on, maybe all of it. I’m just grateful to be from here and have those memories
K: Whenever anyone brings up a New York or Brooklyn accent, especially with so many people who are from here not necessarily having one….I am like THE ONLY PERSON, THE ONLY GIRL I KNOW is Emily Antico, because it’s true. I’ve still yet to hear anyone come through in the way that you do. We all know someone saying KAWfe but on the grander scale, it’s strictly you.
E: I don’t feel that it’s come out in a while because I haven’t been angry in a long time
K: I hear it right now!!
E: I don’t hear it anymore but people comment on it all the time. In teaching, my student population stems from people who have moved here, so they’re always shocked when I open up my mouth
K: I bet parent-teacher conference is fuuuun
E: It is and the best time is June because all the little three and four-year-olds have adopted my Brooklyn accent by then so it is a prime time in my life
K: Giving back to the gentrifiers
E: Oh, I am
Where in the city did you grow up?
E: South Brooklyn *WOOOOTS* Marine Park, which I hate saying because I have a great disdain for Marine Park and that is because they lack any open-mindedness towards cultural diversity and I didn’t realize that until I got to high school and met and made so many friends from different cultures. It was like damn, being Italian/Irish isn’t the only thing?
It was very eye-opening, I met so many great people, learned about great food, and still eat that great food to this day. Now I’m able to connect with people on another level in my adult life in a better way
Does your family still live there?
E: They do
K: Same house?
E: Yup and my grandparents still live across the street. Very true Brooklyn life
K: I so remember any time after a night out, your dad pulling up screenshots of the security cam of you trying to get back into the house in the middle of the night
E: Of me..hobbling in…with like you for example
K: Haha, I remember your room being in the basement and they started building out a patio on top of the entrance door to it…
E: Yeah we thought it would be a great idea instead to break in through the window in the dead of night.. Then we changed our minds to sit on the front porch to smoke a blunt, which somehow woke my mom up and got us back in
K: That basement is where my journey with Shameless began
Do you feel like you grew up too fast being in the city?
E: I like that question. I think a lot of the experiences we gained growing up in Brooklyn were valuable because they taught us lessons. In a sense, I think it was a dangerous lifestyle because it forced me to grow up too fast but I had an awesome childhood with my friends and I didn’t lose that aspect. We all had our first jobs so young, mine was at fifteen. By the time I was eighteen, I was managing a clothing store in Soho. It’s weird, so many people I’ve met traveling and whatnot, don’t get jobs until after college which is wild to me. I worked full-time throughout my entire time at Brooklyn College
K: I remember us working together at Reiss and I was always so proud of you. College AND managing the store. I was only there part-time on weekends, otherwise I was a Barista and student throughout the rest of the week.
E: We can thank adderall for being able to do that physically. The hustle was real and the drama even more so
K: Oh that store saw everything, my hangovers, meltdowns, who knows what else
E: I would be throwing up in the bathroom on a Saturday. They’d stick me in the stock room because I looked ill. It gave me a different love for the city, which I didn’t go into that often, to begin with. There was a youthfulness that came with it because in high school we would go to St. Marks to get drunk and pierced but being a part of the New York hustle and bustle in Soho was a very different cool at that time
K: Working in the pits of Soho in your youth put everything into such a different perspective- the reach of clientele we were working with..
E: ARNOLD SCHWARZENEGGER and STACY LONDON baby
K: I was not even aware haha
Are we gate-keeping or do you want to share the spots that have been unique to you?
E: Let’s see. Pizza Wagon is always a staple, nothing beats that Sicilian slice. It’s so home and the fact that you can still only buy it with cash- you gotta have cash and they don’t deliver. Kudos to them for not falling into the trap, I appreciate it
K: They don’t deliver??
E: Nope, you’ve gotta go there and experience it, I appreciate that also. Oooh my favorite places hmm, Coszcal de Allende in Bayridge, off-the-chain Mexican food, family run, just everything you want in a Brooklyn restaurant. I go there and I’m always remembered, it’s just so wholesome with the mom working in the kitchen and the dad fixing one thing or another- this is their livelihood and it means so much to them, and in turn, it means so much to the patrons that go there. I remember I bought the “Heart” album for a friend and we left it there and I mean when do people ever do good things? But I went back for it and they held it down for about three months
*I laugh at three months*
E: I was very thankful, what a beautiful moment. Let me get out of my Bay Ridge skull now. You know what’s sad, all of my favorite places have closed, this one French spot in the city…your dad's restaurant! That place will always have a special spot in my heart
K: Oh.. when he was managing Taras Bulba..also in Soho (A very special place in my own heart- a classic Ukrainian hub for food and fun). I felt very socialite with access to that haha. I remember at a point I was telling all my girlies to pull up on Fridays when my dad wasn’t around, so we could feast and pre-game going to the Lower East Side
E: Best girls' nights ever
K: Full stomachs, pretty tipsy, pre-drunk wreckage. Very side note -this just reminded me of a time when we were in the LES, smoking a ciggy on a corner, very out loud seeing Ryan from “The Office” and just being like “Hiiii Ryan” and him turning back to us with a ‘Hey, guys’
E: That lives in my mind rent-free to this day
K: I wasn’t aware that he had an actual name until I read a book by him at some later point and I was like “Oh.. he has a name and it’s B.J Novak”
E: We’ll always have “HII, Ryan”. Also, North Dumpling in LES, fire dumpling spot where you could get 10 for $4 and they have allll the sauces
What has changed in the last five or ten years that has been hard to watch?
E: It's been hard watching my friends who were raised here struggling to find an apartment to live in as adults. I’ve gotten lucky with a semi-rent-controlled apartment which was passed down to me but It’s all very unachievable wealth now. No regular person in society is able to live comfortably anymore and that goes for coffee being $8. It’s sad because there is a lot of mental health being healed when someone is able to take themselves out for breakfast or coffee with a friend. When that becomes unaffordable what do we do?
K: That’s fair. I got breakfast with a friend this morning even though my house was close by and I could have made us breakfast instead of paying $30 for it but I wanted to sit outside and have someone else make food for me on my day off. It was overpriced and I get that but at this point, all we have left are the “treat myself” moments to go off of, what else is there to do? Those little pleasures are going to give me the time that I crave within my community. Even us here right now, this iced tea was $6 but I get to sit outside with you and enjoy summer which wouldn’t be the same if we met at my house with the a.c on
E: Exactly. I think that’s what scares me—how hard it will be with unaffordability. Will it ever get to a point where we’re totally sectioned off? With rent and the cost of everything else getting so out of control, it’s worrying. When did a BEC start being $10?
K: I bought a full-size bag of cool ranch Doritos the other day… guess how much this shit cost me. Just kidding don’t guess. It was $6.50, what is happening???
E: We used to go to the corner store for $1 and get snackies and a quarter drink
K: For a $1, in the first grade I felt RICH. That was four small bags of any Frito Lay chip. I was rocking out to Spongebob after school eating my assorted four bags like a queen, no one could stop me
E: The financial and population situation here has become so out of control and different from what it once was, making me question whether I want to spend the rest of my life here. It’s a significant concern for me. I love being a New Yorker and I love being from Brooklyn but all the things that I love about it are slowly slipping away so maybe there’s something bigger and better out there that I’ve yet to find
K: I think about that often and I don’t mind the thought of moving away as hard as I once used to. There’s something to be said about walking down a street and not having it be crowded as fuck
E: I won’t go to the city in the summer because of the tourists and having to swim through mobs of sweaty bodies disgusts me
K: Gah even that train ride into the city is gross
What do you do for work?
E: I am a teacher
K: How do you like it?
E: Hahaha. It’s a rollercoaster of emotion. I’m embracing the fact that I’m exactly where I need to be right now, and this acceptance is helping me find joy in my work. It took a lot of maturing and emotional maturity within that to realize that sometimes you have to relinquish control and let things happen the way that they’re supposed to. My job has helped me deal with that a lot because I’m a control freak and you can’t be a control freak when you’re trying to control fifteen four-year-olds, that’s never going to work so you kind of drive yourself insane. So you just let it go. I appreciate the little moments in my life where I can help kids and do what I’m meant to be doing, teaching them to be good people because that’s what’s most important. I work in a private school and I’ve been toying with going to the D.O.E for forever but I think what hurts me the most about teaching is the bureaucracy of it. I see it in the smaller settings of the private schools I’ve worked at so I’m fearful of it on a bigger scale with what the D.O.E is. How little of it is about the kids and how much of it is about money and power so that part unsettles me. But it puts me back in my place of “I don’t have to worry about that, that’s not in my control. What’s in my control is showing up for the kids and putting out little fires everywhere”
Keys to productivity?
E: For me, it’s allowing myself to make mistakes. I’m not productive when I’m hyper-focused on every little thing I do wrong and so I have to accept the fact that people aren’t perfect and I’m just a person so whatever I give is enough. I have to remind myself that I also need to be taken care of, for me that looks like leaving the city and going camping, taking myself out to breakfast, or reading a good book. When I’m all set in a good place, then I can find the time to be productive. Also, coffee- lots of coffee
How do you typically spend a day off?
E: I like to let life surprise me. I try this thing where I go by twenty-four hours at a time. I wake up and try to get in touch with my spirituality, maybe yoga is in my practice and I take it as it comes. Maybe I go on a trip via car, see a friend, share a meal with someone I love, or play with my cat, and eventually I make time for laundry which never ends, or food shopping but those are always at the bottom of my list
K: The laundry, it never ends
What’s the story behind your home and how long have you lived there?
*Followed by the longest cackle from Emily*
K: You don’t have to get into the trenches if you don’t want to
E: I love my home. I sit in my living room looking around and I am so eternally grateful for the space that I have made my own. It is very funky how I found the home in general. I have a roommate now, I love her, she’s awesome, and we vibe so it’s the perfect space to be a woman in. No testosterone up in there, I even have a girl cat. But once upon a time, I lived with a man and he got it through a friend, in the true Brooklyn way of apartments being passed down through friends of friends, family to family. I got lucky, I’m cool with my landlord and he wants me to stay as long as I want to so with that I am happy
What are your favorite must-read books and movies?
E: OOHWEEE. Must see movies, “Silence of the Lambs”, I just watched “Pearl”, “Maxxxine” and “X”, FABULOUS, fabulous, so good! I love a good timepiece and horror so that was a slasher phenomenon for me. “Longlegs” was wild
K: Don’t spoil!!
E: It was shocking and it shook me. I also probably watch “Love Actually” four times a year
K: MY FAVORITE-FAVORITE movie
E: Great soundtrack also
K: Oh GREAT soundtrack, great everything. No notes. Nothing about that movie is wrong, there is only one storyline I’m not a fan of, alas everything great has to have a sprinkle of something bad in it to really enjoy. I watch it EVERY Christmas, it’s a part of my personal storyline, and that movie will stay with me forever
E: It never gets old and it makes Christmas more Christmas. For books, “Stay Sexy and Don’t Get Murdered” by Georgia Hardstark and Karen Kilgariff- recommended for all women everywhere. I recently read “Why Men Love Bitches?” by Sherry Argove which was very satirical, it got me thinking about how much I’m willing to give of myself which then helped me reevaluate some things, maybe I’m giving too much of myself? It’s witty and another must-read for the ladies
K: Do you think you are a bitch or that you need to be more of a bitch?
E: You know what I love about the word bitch? They use it ironically, everyone hates a bitch right? In such a misogynistic society, we’re bred to be these nice girls who never say no, and if you do say no you’re automatically deemed to be a bitch. In actuality, if you have self-respect and boundaries, that doesn’t make you a bitch, that makes you a strong-ass woman. Bitch is a spectrum that I love to be on because there’s also a badass bitch. My last book influences, “Fahrenheit 451” by Ray Bradbury and “1984” by George Orwell, both changed my life in terms of how addicted to sci-fi I am, and in turn “The Martian Chronicles” by Ray Bradbury as well
Night in or night out? How are you spending it?
E: It depends on how I’m feeling. I could be such a couch potato and rot for so long in peace with my cat, Netflix, and Chinese food but I’m also someone who has to go out and do all the things otherwise I get super stir-crazy. So either or, depending on the season
Song currently on repeat?
E: It’s Alanis Morissette, “Head Over Feet”
What’s the one thing in your closet you would save in a fire?
E: My first big paycheck working in the city, I bought these leather high-heeled Vagabond boots, I think I’m coming up on my ten-year anniversary with them, I treasure them and only wear them on special occasions because I hate high heels but they put me on that bad bitch spectrum so for that I’m saving them in a fire
You decide to treat yourself, how do you indulge?
E: Coffee (Clockface in Bay Ridge) and brekkie (Pegasus Diner in Bay Ridge)
Who or what has been your biggest inspiration?
E: Wow. That’s crazy. My life did a total 180 this year and I was living a very different life with little to no inspiration and a lot of hopelessness and despair. My biggest inspiration now is being in A. A and surrounding myself with very inspiring and motivational sober women
K: Applause
Dream dinner party guests?
E: Amy Winehouse
K: She is always on my list
E: Always, she’s sitting next to me. Jim Morrison, the man who got away. Who’s brain would I like to pick? Why are all of my dinner guests deceased? Chris Cornell, Dolly Parton, throwing Alanis Morissette in there, she just goes with the wave. Barack Obama, I know it’s a weird throw into the mix because everyone’s a musician
K: I’m sure he’d appreciate that, he always has his playlists going
E: There’s so much about politics I wonder about and he seems innately good, ya know? Out of the rest of them at least oh and Stevie Nicks duh
Fuck, Marry, Kill- Vape, cigarette or zyn
E: I got this. I would marry a cigarette, fuck a vape and ew kill a zyn
*We think of more for fun*
Rock, paper, or scissors?
E: Marry the rock, fuck the scissors- that’s the bi coming out in me and kill the paper because save the trees